Fri, 25 Jun 2010

Several groups I'm in insist on using LinkedIn for discussions,
instead of a mailing list. No idea why -- it's so much harder to use
-- but for some reason that's where the community went.

Which is fine except for happens just about every time I try to view
a discussion:
I get a notice of a thread that sounds interesting, click on the link
to view it, read the first posting, hit the space bar to scroll down
... whoops! Focus was in that silly search field at the top right of the page,
so it won't scroll.

It's even more fun if I've already scrolled down a bit with the
mousewheel -- in that case, hitting spacebar jumps back up to the
top of the page, losing any context I have as well as making me
click in the page before I can actually scroll.

Setting focus to search fields is a good thing on some pages.
Google does it, which makes terrific sense -- if you go to
google.com, your main purpose is to type something in that search box.

It doesn't, however, make sense on a page whose purpose is to
let people read through a long discussion thread.

Since I never use that search field anyway, though, I came up with
a solution using Firefox's user css.
It seems there's no way to make an input field un-focusable or
read-only using pure CSS (of course, you could use Javascript and
Greasemonkey for that); but as long as you don't need to use it,
you can make it disappear entirely.

Add this line to chrome/userContent.css inside your Firefox profile
(create it if it doesn't already exist):

Then restart Firefox and load a discussion page.
The search box should be hidden,
and spacebar should scroll the page just like it does on most web pages.

Of course, this will need to be updated the next time
LinkedIn changes their page layout. And it's vaguely possible that
somewhere else on the web is a page with that hierarchy of element names.
But that's easy enough to fix: run a View Page Source
on the LinkedIn page and add another level or two to the CSS rule.
The concept is the important thing.